My mom took my daughter shopping for her 14th birthday and she came home with this. It sat in it's box new and unused for 2 years. For the record my daughter never wears makeup,and doesn't even know how to blow dry her hair.Today we pulled this out out the closet where it has been safely stored (again for the record,new, in it's original box), plugged it in and set off to curl my daughter's hair for prom. I watched over an hour of YouTube videos.Results were poor ... no consistency in the curls (well, waves are more like it), and could only do about a finger thickness amount of hair at a time. But, hey, I had no experience using it, so perhaps I did it wrong despite following the same technique as shown in every single video i watched.It was also so not that you couldn't hold it except at the very ends, but a lot of people wear gloves so maybe it's normal. But it left my daughter's hair so hot that it burned to touch it and that was even with a quick swipe to "tame" the fly-aways. Wasn't sure if this was normal but it was concerning.However, the bigger, more dangerous issue was the loud "pop" that came from it, the burning not little projectile ball of rubber that shot out of the electrical cord where it connects to the iron and the smoke that came pouring out of the hole left behind from the tiny little explosive "pop". We had used it for about 20 minutes.This is extremely dangerous. Don't risk your or your loved ones life with this garbage.